Pretty impressive meteor shower last night. I saw about 20 meteors in about 20 minutes. It was a perfect night, Orion was quite bright and the Milky Way behind it. I'm going to try and get away from the city tonight and enjoy the show.

I spent most of my lunch trying to figure out what this means exactly.

Here is a pretty good two part article, the first link explains the basics of sub-atomic physics, the 2nd link explains why scientists are trying to search for these undiscovered particles, such as the Higgs-Boson.

I spent most of my lunch trying to figure out what this means exactly.

Here is a pretty good two part article, the first link explains the basics of sub-atomic physics, the 2nd link explains why scientists are trying to search for these undiscovered particles, such as the Higgs-Boson.

I spent most of my lunch trying to figure out what this means exactly.

Here is a pretty good two part article, the first link explains the basics of sub-atomic physics, the 2nd link explains why scientists are trying to search for these undiscovered particles, such as the Higgs-Boson.

A guy I work with has a degree in physics and he's not 100% sure what it all means.

Indeed, it is very heady stuff. Even trying to scratch the surface of it will make your head hurt. One thing that is very important to the Higgs-Boson is that it has zero quantum spin.

from the 2nd article:

At first glance, quantum spin doesn't seem that much different from things we observe in the classical world. If you take a charged object and spin it around, the charge creates a loop of current, and that current in turn creates a magnetic field. That is, more or less, how you make an electromagnet, and that's basically what spin is in a quantum sense as well. Seems simple enough, right?Here's where things get a bit weird.If we're talking about an electromagnet in the observable, classical world, it's perfectly easy to make the charged object spin a little slower or a little faster, alternately decreasing or increasing the strength of the magnetic field. But an electron doesn't work that way - its spin will always be the same, and there's absolutely nothing in the universe that will change it. The electron's spin is an intrinsic, unchanging property - rather like if our charged object in the physical world was always spinning at the same speed, regardless of any outside interference.Besides, this analogy only works for particles that have a charge to begin with. Particles with neutral charge like the photon and neutrino also have spin, but since they have no charge there's no related magnetic effect. There's really no completely accurate way to talk about spin without at least a few semesters of college level physics (at the very least), but for our purposes, three things are really important to know: it's an intrinsic, unchanging property of all particles, it represents the angular momentum of the particle, and it creates a magnetic moment. As for the elementary particles, all the leptons and quarks have spin-1/2, and all the bosons have spin-1.

I've always found it interesting as to what gives something charge. Like a proton is positively charged... why? Well, because it has two up quarks and one down quark and 2(2/3) + 1(-1/3)= +1 but what give quarks charge? What is the basic fundamental reason that charge exists? This is something that's always puzzled me.

I guess it's a mix of philosophy and science. It's kind of like evolution. I accept evolution, but how did it all start? What cause Earth to form? The big bang? How did the big bang occur? What was the driving force behind it? Law of conservation of matter... matter can't be created nor destroyed, well then where the hell did it come from? Has it just always been and always will be?